Azure Improves Table Storage Paging

Microsoft Azure Mobile Services .NET Backend Azure Storage Extension is more than a mouthful to say. Good thing it's easier to just download and install it from NuGet, now that it's been through a recent incremental update to 1.0.45, as has the client-side Windows Azure Mobile Services 1.2.5.

Both packages are needed to provide apps with the capability to page through large tables stored in cloud-based tables via continuation links exposed on the client side. It's a simple problem, really, and an even solution, as described in this blog post from Carlos Figueroa, a senior software engineer with Microsoft Azure Mobile Services.

What Figueroa describes there is a method for skipping through pages of data stored in SQL Azure, Azure Table Storage, and MongoDB tables via continuation links. He writes that tables containing a large number of items that are kept in those kinds of table storage didn't "support 'skipping' items like SQL queries do, so the application couldn't use paging to navigate through all the items in their tables."

With the updates, Figueroa said that client-side apps can now "can now retrieve and follow the continuation links on the client so that we can do proper paging for table storage-backed data."

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